Jurassic Park

[MaastrichtianGuy]

since someone posted a topic about the third Jurassic Park sequel Jurassic World i decided to post about the original or the first Jurassic Park movie.so here it is.Jurassic Park.

Brachiosaurus




Parasaurolophus

Triceratops



Tyrannosaurus Rex




Gallimimus


Dilophosaurus



Velociraptor

[CrypticPrism]

I wouldn't call it the best in the world but, eh. It does deserve a thread.

[Jose S.M.]

I know it's not "the best" movie but it's significant in many ways, and personally it's like the first live action film that I have memory of, so It has a special place for me.

[Mirroraptor]

Maybe not the best dinosaur movie, but Jurassic Park is-and always will be-a great dinosaur movie. Not only the story, the music and the camera lens-but everywhere. In especial the restore of dinosaurs. They do not only restore but also arts. I mean many of nowadays Paleo-'artists' just do the restore and no any arts, maybe also no any paleo. They did it, the real paleo-art that both strict and aesthetic.
Obsolete? I don't think so. Many ideas of Jurassic Park's character arts has been certified as exceeded their age.
How about Jurassic World? I don't want to talk about this movie, just because it's a fun movie but not a good sequel of Jurassic Park, also not a really-good dinosaur movie. The core of the former is rewritten. All deep meaning is removed. No any popular science about paleontology. And terrible character arts-I don't mind the featherless raptors, but they're just copying the past-and not really imitation in the bones. They didn't know why they restored these dinosaurs in this way. So we can see the raptor's teeth came out from her cheekbones, the undernourished Tyannosaurus rex that looks like has a Torvosaurus' body, and so on.

[Takama]

This Movie is the Best Dinosaur movie ever because without it, people in the public will still think Dinosaurs wallked around like this



Despite what Sceintists have been trying to teach them since the 70s.   

[PumperKrickel]

deleted

[GasmaskMax]

Im surprised there isn't already a thread for this, as well as everything else Jurassic Park themed...

[WarrenJB]

Agreed with Takama and SuperiorSpider. It's difficult to overemphasise just what kind of an impact Jurassic Park had, in terms of the popular perception of dinosaurs and film effects. It's almost a 'you had to be there' event.

For dinosaur movies, what we had before 1993 (long before 1993) were effects like this:



And this:



And this:



(Meaning no offence to the legend that was Ray Harryhausen, but 60s schlock starts to look a bit creaky after a while. Well, not 100% offence - the self-professed dinosaur fan didn't care about differences between Tyrannosaurus and Allosaurus because 'they were all the same thing')

Heck, even this had those previous films beat, IMO:



Then along came Jurassic Park and things just... changed. It really shook things up. Digital effects had been used before, but in a relatively limited way - not to this extent and not so convincingly. Nobody expected the CG realism, and it was helped by the fact that nobody expected the creatures brought to life by it, either. This wasn't yer daddy's Sinclair-brand Zallingosaurs - the dinosaur renaissance had finally caught up with popular culture, thanks to Steven Spielberg having a crack at one of Michael Crichton's novels. The dinosaurs were fast and smart and warm-blooded... and held their tails up. You had to be a dinosaur nerd to know much about animals like Deinonychus in '92, but a year later dromaeosaurids were practically a household name, and the name was 'raptors'. There's a line spoken by Alan Grant, old news to us dino enthusiasts then and now, and easily overlooked, but significant - "they do move in herds".

It's still incredibly influential a quarter of a century later, so much so that you could say it's leap forward is now holding us back, and it's been downhill from there. Unlicensed dinosaur merchandise still cribs from the inaccurate 'angry eyes' Tyrannosaur, fat-headed Velociraptor, and frilled Dilophosaur designs. Dudebros moan that feathers mean 'science ruined dinosaurs', when they really mean 'science invalidated a handful of movie monsters'.* (As if we're only allowed one leap forward in dinosaur understanding, dictated by pop culture.) The JP franchise itself is mired in the past, having moved from paradigm-shifter to only having that movie monster reputation to hang onto.
* It's nothing new. Not to pick on Harryhausen, but another of his chestnuts was his dislike of raised tails, because tail-dragging dinosaurs 'just looked better'.

CG effects started being used for everything, everywhere, no matter how appropriate or creaky; ignoring the fact that the advance in digital effects displayed in Jurassic Park was accompanied by a similar advance in practical animatronics, and perhaps most significantly, by Spielberg at the height of his powers. Apart from almost seamlessly blending the two forms of effects, the story is a good if slightly truncated adaptation of the original novel. That's maybe a matter for another post (as well as a bunch of other little things I could mention) but there are only a few stumbles in that side of things. It also means that those things I moaned about hardly detract from the film in itself. So yes, Jurassic Park is the best dinosaur film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1koa2xAxCAw>

Still gives me goosebumps.

[Silvanusaurus]

So many films have been derivative of Jurassic Park in the years since, and yet so many of those films fail to recreate one of the main things that made the original so effective; restraint. Whether it was a deliberate story-telling choice, or a result of the limitations of the technology at the time; it used it's visual effects relatively sparingly and actually built up tangible tension around them. I had disregarded Jurassic Park a few years ago as just being a dumb effects movie, but i hadn't watched it properly since i was much younger. When I actually went back and re-watched it with a fresh pair of eyes; i was blown away, in particular by the incredible appearance of the T rex. The CGI may not have the detail of what we see today, but the way it was incorporated as an accompaniment to (rather than a replacement of) the mind-blowing animatronics was a hell of a lot more impressive than most of whats been shown in monster movies since. Film-makers today seem to take the attitude that because they have the technology to just throw CGI monsters at the screen from the get go, that thats what they should do, but it has no impact and results in these flat, hollow and lifeless films like Kong: Skull Island and Jurassic World, wherein theoretically amazing imagery is paraded before your eyes throughout, and yet doesnt amaze in the slightest. The result is boring and ironically unfantastical in the extreme. In Jurassic Park, the space between the dinosaurs was even more important than the creatures themselves, which is why it doesnt matter that they aren't accurate depictions any more, because of how powerful they are in the context surrounding them, regardless of accuracy. 

[BlueKrono]

Restraint... haha.

"You never had control; that's the illusion!"

[DinoToyForum]

Film-makers today seem to take the attitude that because they have the technology to just throw CGI monsters at the screen from the get go, that thats what they should do...

You mean... they stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as they could, and before they even knew what they had, they patented it, packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox. They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they never stopped to think if they should. 
---
Jurassic Park is my favourite film.

[Cloud the Dinosaur King]

Agreed with Takama and SuperiorSpider. It's difficult to overemphasise just what kind of an impact Jurassic Park had, in terms of the popular perception of dinosaurs and film effects. It's almost a 'you had to be there' event.

For dinosaur movies, what we had before 1993 (long before 1993) were effects like this:



And this:



And this:



(Meaning no offence to the legend that was Ray Harryhausen, but 60s schlock starts to look a bit creaky after a while. Well, not 100% offence - the self-professed dinosaur fan didn't care about differences between Tyrannosaurus and Allosaurus because 'they were all the same thing')

Heck, even this had those previous films beat, IMO:



Then along came Jurassic Park and things just... changed. It really shook things up. Digital effects had been used before, but in a relatively limited way - not to this extent and not so convincingly. Nobody expected the CG realism, and it was helped by the fact that nobody expected the creatures brought to life by it, either. This wasn't yer daddy's Sinclair-brand Zallingosaurs - the dinosaur renaissance had finally caught up with popular culture, thanks to Steven Spielberg having a crack at one of Michael Crichton's novels. The dinosaurs were fast and smart and warm-blooded... and held their tails up. You had to be a dinosaur nerd to know much about animals like Deinonychus in '92, but a year later dromaeosaurids were practically a household name, and the name was 'raptors'. There's a line spoken by Alan Grant, old news to us dino enthusiasts then and now, and easily overlooked, but significant - "they do move in herds".

It's still incredibly influential a quarter of a century later, so much so that you could say it's leap forward is now holding us back, and it's been downhill from there. Unlicensed dinosaur merchandise still cribs from the inaccurate 'angry eyes' Tyrannosaur, fat-headed Velociraptor, and frilled Dilophosaur designs. Dudebros moan that feathers mean 'science ruined dinosaurs', when they really mean 'science invalidated a handful of movie monsters'.* (As if we're only allowed one leap forward in dinosaur understanding, dictated by pop culture.) The JP franchise itself is mired in the past, having moved from paradigm-shifter to only having that movie monster reputation to hang onto.
* It's nothing new. Not to pick on Harryhausen, but another of his chestnuts was his dislike of raised tails, because tail-dragging dinosaurs 'just looked better'.

CG effects started being used for everything, everywhere, no matter how appropriate or creaky; ignoring the fact that the advance in digital effects displayed in Jurassic Park was accompanied by a similar advance in practical animatronics, and perhaps most significantly, by Spielberg at the height of his powers. Apart from almost seamlessly blending the two forms of effects, the story is a good if slightly truncated adaptation of the original novel. That's maybe a matter for another post (as well as a bunch of other little things I could mention) but there are only a few stumbles in that side of things. It also means that those things I moaned about hardly detract from the film in itself. So yes, Jurassic Park is the best dinosaur film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1koa2xAxCAw>

Still gives me goosebumps.

For the first one, if you're going to make a Triceratops, why couldn't they have used a normal male Jackson's Chameleon instead of a Rhinoceros Iguana with 2 extra horns strapped to it? I have a pet Jackson's Chameleon named Zilla and he almost looks like a mini Triceratops, except for the lack of a crest, his feet, and his prehensile tail.

[Silvanusaurus]

Film-makers today seem to take the attitude that because they have the technology to just throw CGI monsters at the screen from the get go, that thats what they should do...

You mean... they stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as they could, and before they even knew what they had, they patented it, packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox. They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they never stopped to think if they should. 
---
Jurassic Park is my favourite film.

Indeed, I had considered using the quote myself.

[laticauda]

Its tough for me to really say how good the original JP was.     I read the book when it first came out and loved it. When I first saw it in the theatre I was actually disappointed. Some of the key things from the book were not in the movie.  It felt smaller than it should have been and I didn't like how there was all this humor every time things became tense.  I wanted it tense.  That was my initial thoughts and I was thirteen or fourteen at the time. While waiting for it to come to video, I read the making of book and my opinion changed.  When the movie came out on video my mom pre ordered it and it came with a dinosaurs of Jurassic Park poster.  That poster is in my office right above my desk.  Now I respect and enjoy the movie and realize how poorly directors use CGI and special effects since.  It is all about story. 

[Deremer_24]

These series are very old and therefore, my kids haven't watched it yet. They are about to finish watching shows by Andy Yeatman on Netflix and then I can add this to my list. This movie has a lot of parts and I am sure my kids will enjoy each one of it.

[HD-man]

Its tough for me to really say how good the original JP was.     I read the book when it first came out and loved it. When I first saw it in the theatre I was actually disappointed. Some of the key things from the book were not in the movie.  It felt smaller than it should have been and I didn't like how there was all this humor every time things became tense.  I wanted it tense.  That was my initial thoughts and I was thirteen or fourteen at the time. While waiting for it to come to video, I read the making of book and my opinion changed.  When the movie came out on video my mom pre ordered it and it came with a dinosaurs of Jurassic Park poster.  That poster is in my office right above my desk.  Now I respect and enjoy the movie and realize how poorly directors use CGI and special effects since.  It is all about story.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's generally agreed that the movie is overall better than the book. I like the book too & wish that the movie was more like it in certain ways (E.g. Baby-eating compys), but there are 2 things that stuck out to me when I 1st read the book:

-1) The movie's characters are more likable/relatable, especially Lex (See #2: http://babbletrish.blogspot.com/2013/08/so-reading-jurassic-park-in-2013-is.html ).

-2) The movie's story is less about being anti-science & more about being pro-scientific responsibility, especially this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldD_4Puw6RM

[Brontozaurus]

I agree that the movie is far more effective than the book.

The movie's pacing and structure is overall better. The last third of the book really didn't work for me; while it reinforced that the park had never been under control in the first place, it felt like it stalled the plot because by that point the main problem had already been resolved. That and the cuts to Malcolm tripping out on morphine, I felt like they were like Crichton dropping essays into the book when I'd much rather be seeing what the main characters were up to.

Also the movie characters are just more likeable, and I was subsequently more invested in whether they survived or not.

Also also, LEX. Look I get that a small child wouldn't be very useful in a life-threatening situation, but book!Tim gets to do a lot and he's hardly a grownup either. Changing them into the kind of kid characters usually found in Spielberg's movies was a good idea, and making Lex the hacker in an era when tech was very much a guy thing (tm) was great.